Beacon fleet deployment, monitoring, and control are difficult due to the logistical issues posed by the massive number of beacons. This is because each beacon must be individually dealt with. This issue is compounded when a single entity (e.g., a retailer) has multiple physical locations (e.g., venues), each with multiple beacons.
Beacon fleet deployment is particularly difficult because each beacon must be individually programmed (e.g., associated with the managing entity, assigned settings, assigned permissions, associated with content, etc.). For example, each beacon must be individually placed within and assigned to a physical location to enable location-based contextual experiences; this not only requires a virtual map of the physical space for beacon deployment, but also requires a managing entity to manually assign beacons (e.g., via the respective beacon identifiers) to virtual locations on the virtual map.
On-going fleet monitoring (e.g., monitoring beacon operation, health, etc.) is also difficult because conventional beacon monitoring requires the managing entity to physically walk through the physical space to check on each beacon in-person. This can be extremely resource consuming, particularly when the managing entity has multiple locations. Furthermore, beacons can fail (e.g., fall off the wall, cease broadcasting, crash, etc.) between physical checkups, resulting suboptimal beacon operation until the next physical checkup.
On-going beacon control is also difficult because updated settings and firmware needs to be individually loaded onto each beacon. Conventionally, beacon management has required the management entity to walk through the physical space, and individually connect to and program each beacon. This can be extremely resource consuming, particularly when the managing entity has multiple locations. Furthermore, there is a risk that the managing entity forgets to update hidden beacons (e.g., beacons that the managing entity forgets are there, beacons that are visually obscured from view, etc.), leading to end-user experience inconsistencies within the beacon fleet.
Thus, there is a need in the wireless beacon field to create a new and useful system and method for beacon fleet management. This invention provides such new and useful system and method.